


illuminate the inbetween

by openhearts



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: F/M, Post-Lethal White, Set Pre-Troubled Blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26925220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: Lovesick the beat inside my headWaves struck a sea of bitternessLights out solo in the blueBut now I've found youUltralife (acoustic) - Oh Wonder
Relationships: Robin Ellacott/Cormoran Strike
Comments: 21
Kudos: 74





	illuminate the inbetween

It’s a late night at the office, two six packs of Doom Bar and a mess of paper spread over the floor in front of the sofa where they both sit pouring and puzzling over it all. Robin’s drinking - first of all drinking Doom Bar which is rare for her, and nearly matching Strike’s pace which is rarer still - and it gets late enough, the bottles empty enough, that they’re both slurring and blurry-eyed.

“She lived alone all that time. Not even a pet. Near as we can tell never left the house. The only people she interacted with were a grocery deliverer and a penpal from ten years ago. Where would she have gone? How?”

“Fine summary of the case, excellent work,” Strike mutters, tired but not malicious.

Robin hums in agreement and curls her legs up, turned to face Strike and leaned against the backrest of the sofa, her head lolling. He glances over at her.

“You’re tired. Should leave it for the night. We won’t think of anything new in this state.”

"She must have been so lonely,” Robin muses quietly, almost as if she hadn’t heard Strike at all. “Shut up in that house with the curtains drawn. Not even a TV. No music. I think I'd go mad, living like that for so long. So alone."

Strike watches her silently for a beat, then slouches down himself and rests his head on the back of the sofa. 

“So living alone’s going well for you then?”

Robin smacks him half-heartedly with the back of her hand and Strike grins.

“I never lived alone before now. Went right from mum and dad’s to the uni halls to living with Matthew. Maybe it is getting to me.”

“Ah, you’ll be alright. Look how well I’m doing.” Strike gestures expansively at the darkened office and toward the ceiling above which is his own tiny flat.

Robin snorts and lays her head back down, scooted closer now.

“Speaking of flats-” Strike says, making to sit up, but Robin cuts in,

“I was just thinking about having a nightcap.”

Strike glances down at their remaining beers and back at her questioningly.

“Sorry, it’s-” she backtracks.

“D’you want to come up?” Strike asks, part incredulous, part interested.

Robin pauses, caught speechless for a moment before she can answer, “I didn’t mean-”

“For a nightcap.”

“Yeah,” Robin says, glancing at Strike again.

He smiles and knocks his hand on her knee gently. “Come on then Ellacott.”

Strike levers himself up from the sofa, staggering slightly the few steps across the office to pull a bottle of whiskey from the refrigerator.

“Now I must warn you,” Strike begins, gesturing with the bottle as Robin gathers the casefiles up and back into their box.

“I’ve seen your flat, Cormoran,” Robin says, smiling.

“I was just going to say I’ve made some improvements and I didn’t want you to be shocked.”

Robin only smiles and there’s a lull as she stands and looks around briefly, hands pressed together. 

Robin smiles, resigned to Strike’s familiar drunkenness. “Lead the way then.”

They make their way upstairs slowly and the nerves begin to rattle in Robin’s belly along the way. Strike’s on the landing and she’s a step down when she tugs on his sleeve and stops him keying into the door to his attic flat. 

“Hey,” Robin taps on his arm, stopping him from turning the key in the lock. “Are you pissed?”

He looks back, his face carefully shuttered when he sees her expression. He pauses and studies her carefully for a long beat. “Are you-”

“Hm?” she asks, looking up at him. Robin leans into him a bit and shakes her head.

“It’s alright,” she murmurs. “I’m alright.”

They stay like that long enough that the air changes, the quiet closeness of the landing growing heavy around them.

“Doesn’t mean I don’t want a nightcap even if you make it be coffee,” Strike adds, trying for levity. He waits a beat, watching her, and she breathes shakily in and out, nods him on to open the door for them. 

He ushers her inside and adds to her back as he flips on the light, “and it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be a complete gentleman.”

Robin stills. “I know,” she answers, her voice quiet even in the surrounding quiet of the flat.

Strike kicks the door shut behind him and moves to set the whiskey on the table with a thunk. 

“Consequently,” Strike adds as he rummages for glasses, ““I’d offer both of us places to sit but, if you’d like to watch telly the only place we’d fit is the bed, which seems rather forward, even for a gentleman such as myself.” He comes up with two mugs and shrugs at them, placing them on the table.

“Are you implying you’d like to see the highlights of the Arsenal match?”

“Not exclusively but yes in fact I would.”

She goes into his bedroom ahead of him, looks around the little space, smiles at his floral duvet. When she turns back he’s leaning in the doorway watching her, his smile half-nervous and half-fond. They both sit gingerly on the bed, Strike fiddling briefly with the remote until he finds what he’s looking for and turns the volume down to a quiet murmur. Robin runs a finger back and forth around the rim on her mug, lost in thought until she’s jostled gently by Strike’s elbow.

“Where are you then, Ellacott?”

She tries to smile but even that motion is too nervous and weighted to succeed. She swallows, sets down her mug on the little table beside the bed, and sits back with her hands in her lap. Eventually she turns and looks at Strike steadily, reaches out and tucks her fingers around his. Strike’s consciousness shrinks to that touch, to the clumsiness of his big hand rearranging to thread his fingers through hers, to wondering.

“Can I tell you something?”

“Of course, yeah.”

Robin blinks and swallows, flexes her fingers through his and takes in a shaky breath when he does the same back and changes his grip again to squeeze her hand reassuringly. Whatever it is, he can feel the reticence rolling off her.

“I, ehm. I’ve been on a few dates, blind dates, set ups, y’know. Since Matthew and I split up.”

This, Strike wasn’t expecting. Is she getting married again?

“Okay,” he says finally, another silence pulling out longer and longer. 

He’s too awake now and his buzz just makes him feel off balance even slouched on the bed as he is.

“The thing is . . . the thing is none of them-” her fingers squeeze his nervously and she takes another shaking breath. She closes her eyes and her cheeks and neck flood with color. “I haven’t been with anyone. Since Matthew.”

“Oh. Fuck,” Strike blurts, eyebrows climbing to his hairline before he can get his face under control.

She tears up readily, easily, with nearly any kind of stress - he’s known this about her since that first week, but that's never stopped him reacting, wanting to do something, anything, to make it stop. Sometimes simply because it’s so nakedly honest and he’s not sure how to hold what she says with those tears in her eyes delicately enough.

“I tried, with one of them. Wendell. He was sweet, I thought it might be okay.”

Now her eyes well up enough that a few fat droplets slide down her cheeks.

Strike might have to murder Wendell. He can call Shanker to help dispose of the body.

“But I had a panic attack.” Robin huffs out a miserable laugh and uses her free hand to scrub her wrist over her cheeks and then her runny nose. “As you can imagine he ran for the hills. Not that I was going to call him again anyway.”

“Shit, that’s. That’s awful, Robin. ‘M sorry.”

She shakes her head, the way she generally brushes away those expressions. They're alike in their stubborn refusal of any shade of pity.

“Anyway after that I just sort of . . . I wasn’t ready, I realized. Not just because of the PTSD. Matt was the only one.” 

Strike blinks. Fuck. Not that he’d tried to think about it before, but it makes perfect sense. So much conspired to cause her to keep herself alone. Keep herself safe. A familiar ugly part of Strike staggers anew at Matthew's spectacular privilege and numerous failures.

“And after I found about Sarah, everything - how long it took me to be ready after I left uni - it just all came back. So I just gave up. But it's so- it's pathetic but I'm so lonely. I miss being touched.”

Strike squints, brow furrowed. There’s a large portion of his brain that knows where this is probably going and another portion that steadfastly refuses to admit so much as a passing knowledge of the English language itself. 

She turns her big blue eyes to his and that’s it. He knows. 

She leaves the silence to finish for her but he can still feel the words, can hear her voice in his head clear as day. They’re leaned toward each other already and it would be so easy to close that space, to spare them both another second of waiting.

“Surely you’ve got better choices than me?” he blurts. Someday maybe he’ll learn when not to make a joke with her. It hasn’t happened yet.

Robin’s face hardens and she starts to tug her hand away from his but Strike winces and pulls her back, sudden enough to draw her closer than she’d been before.

“I’m sorry, I’m not - I didn’t mean to be cruel.”

Robin swallows. “I know.” 

Then her eyes turn back to his and he can feel himself sinking in, losing touch with every long-held reason that’s kept him from this place for years now.

“Just . . . just tell me if you don’t want- I’d understand. I know it’s-”

“Robin. Even if I didn’t love you, it’d be a fucking honor, alright?”

She laughs in spite of herself, chin dipping down and her cheeks pinking up with renewed heat.

“And that wasn’t how I meant to say that,” he adds, quietly, jostling her hand in his a bit.

It feels like he’s taken a swan dive off a cliff. Maybe they've stepped off together. Hand in hand, rushing onward.

Robin scoots closer, easing her way across the short distance between them until she’s close enough that he can feel her jittery breaths, can imagine the rabbit twitch of her pulse. She stops, unsettled with her legs bent under her, clearly not sure where to rest her hands, eyes flicking. Her soft breaths smell of beer, same as the taste in his mouth, like they’ve already kissed.

“Here?” he breathes, a little incredulous.

She looks around, startled, and shrugs. It seems to undo her balance a bit further and she sways in, swallows nervously.

“I might chicken out,” she says in a half-hearted show of nonchalance.

“It’d be alright,” he answers immediately. He reaches up and brushes a lock of hair behind her ear, cups her face when she nudges her forehead against his. “Anything’s alright,” he repeats. 

She nods, her motion making his own head bob with hers. It makes them both smile into their kiss. 

Not the first, technically, even though the one in the hospital car park had had something real in it, something more than accidental. It’s easy, so easy, and- joyful, somehow. Her tears are still drying on her cheeks after stiltedly half-explaining and then willing the rest into Strike’s brain from her own by sheer force of will. Finally kissing her is a relief, is discovery and returning home all at once. 

Robin’s delicate but insistent, pressing closer, her own hand on his cheek leaving her in an awkward position with nothing to brace her weight on but him, so he pulls her onto his lap. Robin gasps, their mouths just parted.

“Okay?” Strike asks.

“Yeah,” she breathes, already pulling him back in, pressing her smile to his.

When she pulls away again it’s to shift so she’s straddling his lap, looking down at him, at his big hands sliding up her thighs. Robin drops her hands over his and nods, helps him brush her cardigan off her shoulders and drops it to the floor, then falls back to his mouth again. He’s deliciously slow, Strike, and it calms her nerves, pulls her out of her head and into every sensation; the scrape of his stubble; those hands brushing up her arms; fingers sliding along the straps of her camisole and down her spine. Robin shivers at that and she can feel Strike’s smile when he does it again.

“Proud of yourself?” she asks even as she trembles, tipping her head back and shifting on his lap.

Strike groans and grips her waist, holding her back slightly so he can look into her eyes. She scratches at his shoulders through his shirt. “Sure?” he asks searchingly.

“Yes,” she repeats, a small smile lighting her reddened lips and puffy eyes. She cups his cheeks in her hands and kisses his mouth sweetly before rising carefully, climbing off his lap. 

Robin kicks off her shoes, shorter without the low heels. Her smart trousers are creased and her camisole rumpled from Strike’s hands. Robin holds a hand out to him, beckoning, and he stands with her obediently, leg and exhaustion and all of it be damned.

Robin looks up at him, inhaling deeply and then sighing into it when he takes her face in his hands and kisses her. She grips his wrists gently but leaves his hands - even if it never happens again his warm strong hands will stay with her, she knows. He’d tugged his own shirt untucked from his pants hours earlier as they’d poured over the casefile and now she unbuttons it and like she had he helps her peel it off and toss it away. He startles when her knuckles brush his belly, her fingers tugging his belt undone, and she smiles against his mouth, chases his shuddering sigh with her tongue and slides her hands along his hips over his boxers.

She’d never pictured the process of removing his prosthesis in any fantasy she’d had of them together, and insanely that had made her feel a bit guilty sometimes, like she couldn’t even be bothered with verisimilitude when bringing herself off to thoughts of her business partner. Now she drops his trousers to his ankles and trusts him to guide them both through the rest.

When he sits heavily on the bed Robin kneels down too and averts her eyes from his hands carefully peeling back the sock, focusing instead on untying the boot on his other foot and tugging it off. He’s made quick work of the leg and is tugging off his other sock and kicking out of his trouser legs when she stands and undoes her own trousers. Shucking them off is suddenly nerve wracking and she feels so naked standing there in her camisole and knickers that the thought of just calling it off now flits through her mind.

Strike sees her, quietly watching from his place on the bed, himself exposed as he never has been with her. This was another part she’d never fantasized; the reality of being seen.

“Robin?” he murmurs.

“I want to,” she starts, then swallows and regains her bearings. “I want to so if . . . if I have another panic attack you have to know it’s not you. Alright? There’s no one in the world I trust like I trust you.”

“Anything’s alright,” he repeats.

She nods jerkily, still rooted to the floor, and closes her eyes just to escape the moment, to give herself an out. She doesn’t want to take it. She wants this, wants it with him.

“Lay down,” she whispers. 

He obeys and she crawls over him, both their breaths coming slow and heavy. There’s so little between them now that she can feel him clearly, hard and twitching between her legs and she leans over him, takes his mouth in a kiss and reaches between them to cup him through his boxers. Not that she’d been making bets with herself but-

“Oh! Fuck,” she blurts.

Strike laughs out loud, strained on a groan at the end, and she can’t help herself from giggling, high on nerves but so, so safe. They both quiet into another kiss, and another, another, broken only for Robin’s, “please, please touch me,” and her keening gasp when he does, his wide hands roving everywhere they hadn’t before.

He slides his fingers between her thighs over her knickers, his breathing as pained as hers when they break apart, her forehead against his and her eyes squeezed shut.

“Hey,” he gasps, “look at me.”

She does, his familiar wide-set blue eyes with the wrinkles at the corners that she loves, the soft freckles scattered over his cheeks, his scarred upper lip.

“Yes, yes,” she babbles, letting out a breathless groan when he thumbs at her searchingly and her hips stutter. Then, “just take them off."

He flips them over, landing her on her back on his sheets, kisses her deeply, and then crawls back between her splayed legs to drag her knickers off and leave them to tangle in the bedclothes. He eyes her through his lashes and kisses her thigh pointedly, waiting. The sound she makes is encouraging, but not remotely coherent and Strike grins and bows his head to her.

It had never been this, somehow, in her dreams of him, but it will be now - his whiskered jaw between her thighs, his lips, his tongue, his groan when she digs her nails into his arm and shudders, finally flying apart under his mouth.

Strike lingers, giving licks that jolt her with aftershocks, stroking with his thumbs, and pressing slow kisses to her twitching inner thighs. They lock eyes when she cards her fingers through his hair and he keeps holding her gaze when he slides his fingers over and then just inside her, grinning at her gasp and covering her with his mouth again. 

She cries harder this time, not a few errant tears but gut-deep sobs, clenching around two of his thick fingers, clawing at his scalp, tensed all over until her body gives over. 

As she comes down she's vaguely aware of Strike’s own gasping breaths, his hands framing her hips and his open mouth pressed to the curve of her belly that she'd worried over and tried to nip in and flatten out when her wedding was looming. Strike crawls up her body slowly, settles himself along her side and wraps her up in his arms when she turns into him, trembling weakly and letting out little moans with each breath.

"Are you okay?" He asks eventually.

Robin mumbles wordlessly and squirms closer, reaches up to kiss him.

"Fuck, Robin," he mutters between kisses, brushing sweat-sticky hair off her cheeks and following his touches with firm reverent kisses. 

Her head's starting to slot back together, random thoughts of coming in to work the following week tripping through and she reaches up to grip his wrist. He stops and stares down at her and she swallows, wrung out and nervous.

"It's alright," he whispers before she can ask. "We'll make it alright."

She nods up at him slowly and he joins in, both of them reaching together for another kiss. This time she slides a hand down to grip at him through his boxers again and Strike groans and bucks up into her hand, quickly reaching down to hold her still by her wrist.

"I won't be any use to you if you keep doing that," he mutters ruefully. Robin smiles, revels in how unmoored he sounds, how overcome. She wants more.

"D'you have anything?"

"Yeah, yeah," he leans up and rummages briefly in a drawer and Robin strokes and presses kisses along the bare skin of his back. He pauses, wrapped condom in hand, and stills under her mouth, his head lolling.

"I meant it, y'know," he says quietly, still faced away from her, still sighing at her mouth on his skin.

Robin breathes in and pulls him down to his back, stays bent over him pressing kisses all across his broad shoulders, the base of his throat.

"I know," she murmurs. 

She moves tugs at the elastic of his boxers, licks the soft skin at his hip when he lifts up to help her pull them off. She straddles him, strokes over his thighs as he puts on the condom, then pulls off her camisole and rids herself of her bra. Strike stares quietly, hands on her thighs, breath heavy, waiting.

"This wasn't how I meant to say it either," she adds, one hand on his chest to steady herself as she leans up and then slides down onto him slowly. "Fuck," she whispers, voice gone high, eyes screwed tightly shut as she takes him in.

Strike’s silence is strained, body tight, but his hands are soft and gentle on her hips and stroking up her back. When she lets out a little cry - more at the overwhelm of it all finally happening than discomfort - Strike surges up, one hand braced on the mattress and the other on her neck to steady her against him.

"You okay?" He asks, his own voice weak.

Robin nods jerkily and presses her cheek to his. "Are you?" She whispers back.

"Yeah," he sighs, cursing again when she starts to rise and fall and pushes him to his back.

Everything is the heat of their breaths, the soft murmurs of the sheets, Robin's hands braced on Strike’s chest, his under her thighs helping her along, her shocked groans of approval. 

She can feel him starting to tense, to stutter, his groans going tighter and higher and she grips his wrists, pins them to the mattress and rides him through his end, finally collapsing on his chest, the both of them sweating and spent.

_

Later, when they're settled under the sheets, fingertips drawing over skin, eyes drooping, Robin whispers,

"It wasn't just me who was lonely. Was it?"

"I think I was waiting for you."

Strike feels the curl of her smile against his chest.

"How long would you have waited if I didn't ask for a pity shag?"

"Far too long, obviously."

Robin’s hand finds his under the sheet and their fingers curl together again, woven and clasped. The sky is dark outside the window and beyond the neon signs shining in on them. Far away, the horizon has just taken its first breath of light.


End file.
